12 Facts About NSA Surveillance That’ll Make Your Hair Stand on End

Now that the House of Representatives is against enhancing privacy protections, it might be time to review some facts about domestic NSA surveillance programs…like the one that knows you are reading this article right now.

Three years following Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extensive NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens, Americans continue to have mixed views about the controversial programs. In fact, a large majority of Americans disapprove of current NSA surveillance techniques, specifically the collection of telephone and internet data, as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.

But in the wake of the massacre that occurred in a Florida nightclub during the summer of 2016, a legislative push to control warrantless surveillance was defeated by an amendment that passed in the House twice prior.

The about-face in the U.S. House of Representatives against enhancing privacy protections amid NSA surveillance is the first congressional repercussion of the Orlando mass-shooting. The amendment would have explicitly prevented funds in the defense spending bill from being allocated to impose surveillance-facilitated redesigns on popular products, or more simply, prohibited spending by the NSA to impose backdoors.

Even James Sensenbrenner, a Republican in the House of Representatives and key sponsor of the PATRIOT Act, affirms that U.S. Congress only intended its application to cases involving national security.

But just look at what the NSA has become:

The National Security Agency was established for international intelligence, but they collect just as much data about US citizens.

Established by President by Harry Truman in 1952, the NSA is responsible for the monitoring, collection, and processing of global information and foreign intelligence data. The agency is also tasked with the protection of the U.S. against network warfare, so it’s terribly ironic that the same agency is implanting malware to spy on its own people.

Under the terms of a blanket order issued to U.S. telecoms, the numbers of both parties on a call are required to be handed over, as is the associated location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. It is not specified whether the contents of conversations are recorded and monitored, though it is widely suspected to be occurring.

A wide-cast net stockpiles text messages from both U.S. and international citizens in an untargeted sweep. Codenamed ‘Dishfire,’ the NSA surveillance program extracts location data, contact networks and even credit card details.

Emails older than six months can be accessed remotely without a warrant by an unspecified government entity.

Back in 1987 when personal email wasn’t the norm, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was enacted. Even the Department of Justice noted as late as 2013 that some of the legislature was outdated, but no further attempts to adjust this have been made.

The NSA has your browser history.

A revelation made in the documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a secretive program called XKEYSCORE. Under this program, the NSA can skip the paperwork for obtaining a warrant and snatch up some 40 billion internet records every month. This is the big grab-all, comprised of Google searches, websites visited, files sent, Windows crash reports, etc.

In 2008, the agency maintained over 150 data processing sites to sift through the mass of information.

The XKEYSCORE NSA surveillance system sites are located in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.

The NSA pays more attention to your social media profiles than your obsessed ex.

Through the famed PRISM program, the agency has the power to pull information from Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat, and even dating profiles. This can be cross referenced with other private data such as GPS location, personal contacts, and frequent activities to build complex accounts of where you are and who you’re with.

Any banking transfers that cross international lines, whether it’s an online payment, an account transfer, or credit card transaction, are flagged by the NSA. The FTM program has specifically targeted customers of big credit card companies like VISA, whose information flows into the NSA’s own financial databank, called “Tracfin.”

Disconnecting your device from the web will not stop the NSA.

Just let that thought sink in: disconnecting your device from the internet will not prevent the NSA from accessing it. One such power comes from NIGHTSTAND, a program that can attack Windows computers from a wireless exploit up to eight miles away. Another example can be found in SURLYSPAWN, a program that uses radio frequency to log keystrokes from as far away as across the street.

There is no true oversight of the NSA’s spying capabilities.

While the Obama administration references two bodies — an independent review board and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — charged with evaluating the constitutionality of its surveillance policies, the checks and balances system here is all wrong. Both organizations indicated on recurring occasions that they were not made fully aware the extent of NSA surveillance, and declassified documentation shows the NSA repeatedly misled the court about the functions of its operations.

The massive NSA surveillance network has never directly prevented a terrorist attack or led to an arrest.

While it’s certainly a bold claim, plenty of research supports it. In a study of 225 counter-terrorism cases where U.S. residents were either indicted on terrorism charges or killed before they could be charged, only 14 cases were launched because of an NSA metadata program. And of those 14 cases, only one case may have aided in preventing “an operational al-Qaeda plot to conduct an attack within the United States” — a stark contrast to the 54 thwarted events declared by President Obama.